Tuesday, September 1, 2015

There are thousands of languages
spoken by humans ~ besides the sign languages and written languages. There also
codes and artificially constructed communication systems, which are also known
as languages. The science of human language is perceived to be fundamentally
different and much complex from those of other species. Then comes the more
complex grammar and syntax.

FORTRAN, COBOL, and
ALGOL were created around the 1950s and many variations of these languages were
still in use during the early 2000s. “Since 1997, my computer-based
communication system has been sponsored and provided by Intel® Corporation.”
States a famous person’s website, and adds that the main interface to the
computer is through a program called EZ Keys, written by Words Plus Inc. This
provides a software keyboard on the screen. A cursor automatically scans across
this keyboard by row or by column. Characters are selected by cheek movements
which are detected by an infrared switch that is mounted on spectacles. This
switch is the only interface with the
computer. ……. It is too complex to read and understand and to think that
somebody is successfully using it, speaks volumes of his greatness.

Faking News interesting wrote that the
hit movie Bahubaliis to be dubbed into
Kiliki, the language of Kalakeyas in the movie.
Rajamouli’s Bahubali is impressive – the two-part fantasy epic, has
broken box-office records all over, in Tamil and Telugu, along with dubbed
Hindi and Malayalam versions. When a
film is a hit, people try to credit it with so many goods. The dialogue writer claimed that it was a
special language, not gibberish, spoken by the warrior hordes headed by warlord
Kalakeya– the language, ‘Kiliki’ boasts of a 750-word vocabulary and more than
40 solid grammar rules ! Popular parallels exist in the way of the elaborate
Elvish language created by JRR Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings trilogy; and
perhaps language of Salamia, in Vikram.
Rubbish, as this is of a different plane !!

Amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS) is a specific disorder that involves the death of neurons. The man spoken about in para 2 above, suffers
from a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of ALS that has gradually paralysed him over the
decades. He had experienced increasing
clumsiness during his final year at Oxford, including a fall on some stairs and
difficulties when rowing. The problems
worsened, and his speech became slightly slurred; the diagnosis of motor neurone disease came
when Hawking was 21, in 1963; at that
time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years. In the late 1960s, his
physical abilities declined: he began to use crutches and ceased
lecturing regularly. As he slowly lost
the ability to write, he developed compensatory visual methods, including
seeing equations in terms of geometry.
He preferred to be regarded as "a scientist first, popular science
writer second, and, in all the ways that matter, a normal human being with the
same desires, drives, dreams, and ambitions as the next person." His speech too deteriorated and became unintelligible.

During a visit to
the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the border of France and
Switzerland in mid-1985, he contracted pneumonia which in his condition was
life-threatening; he was so ill that his wife was asked if life support should
be terminated. She refused but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which would
require round-the-clock nursing care, and remove what remained of his
speech. Years later, he received a
computer program called the "Equalizer" from Walt Woltosz. In a
method he uses to this day, using a switch he selects phrases, words or letters
from a bank of about 2500–3000 that are scanned; and much later he activated a switch using his hand and could
produce up to 15 words a minute.
Lectures were prepared in advance and were sent to the speech
synthesiser in short sections to be delivered. Even that could not last, as in
2005 he lost the use of his hand and began to control his communication device
with movements of his cheek muscles,
with a rate of about one word per minute. One cannot read any further of
the sufferings.

Now with Intel
software, his cheek movements are interpreted in to spoken language. Intel
originally developed the technology especially for Hawking but it has been used
by other sufferers of motor neurone disease (MND). Now it is reported that the software by Intel
that lets physicist Stephen Hawking communicate via a computer has been
published online by the company in the hopes that it will be used by
researchers developing new interfaces for sufferers of diseases like
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The Assistive
Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) helps Hawking communicate by interpreting sensor
data capturing movements in his cheek muscles but other parts of the body may
be used. Anyone can now download and experiment with the system.Intel hopes
that ACAT, which runs on Microsoft Windows 7 or higher, will be used by
researchers developing new interfaces for sufferers of diseases like ALS.The
programme and full source code have been published on code-sharing site GitHub.
Lama Nachman, principal engineer, said that the team had already experimented
with a variety of different sensors, and they are hoping developers will try
out other options suited to each patient’s needs and abilities.